The next BriefingsDirect case study interview explores how improved visibility analytics and predictive responses are improving supply-chain management. We’ll now learn how SAP’s Supplier InfoNet, coupled with the Ariba Network, allows for new levels of transparency in predictive analy...

“We see many companies looking to adopt BYOD strategies for employees, but few who are solely BYOD,” observed Milja Gillespie, Director of Product Marketing, Mobile Security, SAP, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Computing Journal. “Often, they offer corporate devices for certain types...

Introducing SAP is a cost that makes everyone very cautious about the return on this investment. Performance problems with SAP delivery can quickly propagate to seriously affect business operations and lead to tedious war room scenarios. End-user complaints will usually point towards t...

Using Ariba, Koozoo was able to make sophisticated decisions on small-batch purchases of unfamiliar products.
Here to explain the latest and greatest around agile procurement for businesses of any size, we're joined by Ian Thomson, Koozoo’s Head of Business Development, based in San F...

Collaborative spot buying provides an ad-hoc and agile, yet managed, approach for companies to acquire goods and services at low volume.
We'll examine new spot-buying research from The Hackett Group on the latest and greatest around agile procurement of low-volume purchases, and we'll...

Blue Marble Media in Atlanta has been using so-called spot-buying capabilities on the Ariba Network and Ariba Discovery to find new sales channels and new clients in the cloud.
Tell us a little bit about your company -- your size, what services and products you provide. And why is the...

It was never a question of whether SAP would bring it flagship product, Business Suite to HANA, but when. And when I saw this while parking the car at my physical therapist over the holidays, I should’ve suspected that something was up: SAP at long last was about to announce … this.
F...

As you probably know, in lieu of a TechWave this year SAP hosted a separate PowerBuilder Developer’s Conference (PBDC) co-located with SAP TechEd 2012 in Las Vegas from October 21–25. There was a separate but co-located event last year as well, but that was an actual TechWave that repr...

On returning from an awesome SAP TechEd in Las Vegas, I was waiting in the departure lounge for my Virgin Atlantic flight and looked through the iTunesU videos I had on my iPad2. There I saw the WWDC2010 Keynote, one that I had personally attended and decided to view it. Within 10 minu...

With emergence of Big Data and Fast Data, energy shifted back to the data tier given the efficiencies of processing data big or fast inside the data store itself.
In its rise to leadership of the ERP market, SAP shrewdly placed bounds around its strategy: it would stick to its knittin...

While it may seem a little late to consider New Year's resolutions, you should try and identify as many opportunities for reducing paper use as possible. In any given SAP-centric business environment it is likely that there are already a number of measures in place for the creation of ...

Two articles that I read recently, by Jakob Nielsen and by John Brinkman, got me thinking that it was probably time to revisit the very topical subject of form design. In the world of SAP, it comes as no surprise that people want to retain the rich functionality of the ERP system but g...

One sure sign that a new technology market is approaching critical mass is when people start fighting over it. I’m not talking about abstract arguments and dialectical debates about meanings and means. I’m talkin’ fisticuffs, mano a mano, the sweet science! And with cloud computing,...

You may wonder whether it’s too early to make the call given the lack of interoperability standards, security concerns, and common definition of cloud computing. Well, the IPTV space shares many of the same similarities – emerging technology, emerging standards, emerging adoption, var...

This article looks at the basic interoperability requirements when communicating with the Cloud, and in particular at techniques and standards used to express and enforce wire-level contracts between communicating parties, as these parties are increasingly also contracting parties in a...

Everyone wants to lower their capital expenditures and increase operational efficiency - it's a sign of the times. The economy of the past 12 - 18 months has forced all organizations to do more with less and become more efficient. While everyone can identify with the request to do more...

We are standing on the threshold of a new transition in information technology and communications; a radical departure from current practice that promises to bring us new levels of efficiency at a vastly reduced cost. Cloud computing is full of potential, bursting with opportunity and ...

Henry David Thoreau once wrote: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation". Much the same can be said of the multitude of users struggling with open source reporting and analysis tools like Mondrian or Jaspersoft. The difference, of course, if that those folks happen to be prett...

It’s Thursday morning, you’re the CEO of a large, publicly traded company, and you just called your executives into the conference room for the exciting news. The board of directors has approved the acquisition of a key competitor, and you’re looking for a call-to-action to get everyon...

Disaster strikes. Your primary place of business is destroyed by a fire tomorrow, are you prepared to recover? According to the historical statistics, fires permanently close 44 percent of the businesses that are affected. Business continuity planning is the creation and validation of ...

Back in the old good days of enterprise software, we did not need to worry about our customers. We delivered bits on DVDs – it was up to the customers to struggle with installation, integration, management, customization and other aspects of software operations. We collected all ...

Some of the key things to think about when putting your application on the cloud are discussed below. Cloud computing is relatively new, and best practice is still being established. However we can learn from earlier technologies and concepts such as utility com...

VMware: I already have the most popular virtualization software and I will integrate Spring Source and create the best PaaS offering. Amazon EC2: I am extending my cloud facility to a virtual private environment so that you security concerns are taken care. Microsoft: I am giving you a...

On Thursday, September 10th, 2009, I moderated a panel at the 1105 Group’s Enterprise Architecture Conference in Washington, DC entitled, “SOA Goes Mainstream – An Industry and Government Roadmap.” On the panel we had two Federal government agency representatives and two industry repr...

Yesterday a friend of mine was asking me what I've been doing lately in my spare time. When I mentioned that I'd been doing a lot of messing around with Windows Azure, he was naturally curious. After explaining what Azure is, he asked me what the difference was between Windows Azure, a...

Cloud computing is becoming a ubiquitous concept. It has mass-market implications for the technology industry, and it is advancing at speeds rarely seen with any major technological evolution.
As a business leader, do you know why cloud computing is important to you? What parts of y...

The debate has raged for some time now about the exact definition of a 5GL. One might argue that there also is still some debate going on about what exactly is a Platform as a Service PaaS. Throw together two semi-ambiguous industry-specific buzzwords and what do you get? Well, for ...

One of my favorite examinations of the role of the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is Tom Berray’s”Roles of the CTO: Four Models for Success. ”
If you are an enterprise CTO or any technologist looking for career context I strongly recommend it to you for its situation...

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) presents a challenge to software marketing people like none other in recent history. On the one hand, SOA has been the top enterprise software bandwagon to jump on for the last four years or so, but on the other hand, many vendors have struggled to t...

Loose coupling presents architectural challenges that are at the heart of planning and implementing the SOA infrastructure. Building the Service abstraction presents a simplified representation to the business but requires additional efforts under the covers to make that abstraction a ...

After pushing my latest post, Securing the Cloud: Shared Hardware and the Data Plane, Hoff posted a series of excellent questions and responses to the post via Twitter. I thought responding via another blog post, so that his questions could be addressed alongside my last post, was the ...

I’ve written a good bit here about the various ways Microsoft and Citrix overlap in the hypervisor space, ranging from topics like shared code base through competition for the desktop space. To me, these two players have always been the underdogs battling for the right to go head-to-he...

As part of my job, I help customers to select the appropriate software to either fulfill a need or as a component of a larger solution. Fulfilling this role means comparing similar software offerings and selecting the best fit. The challenge in this goal is to map the vendor offering...

Cloud computing budgets worldwide are reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and no organization can survive long without some sort of cloud migration strategy. Each month brings new announcements, use cases, and success stories.